Life is better when it's simple…

530 Square Feet of Happiness

I know “tiny homes” are the big rage right now and my husband and I dutifully watch HGTV’s Tiny House Hunters every week marveling at the creative uses of space. How they get everything they need and want into such a finite living abode is nothing short of marvelous.

But as I am watching these episodes, I realize hey wait a minute! My space isn’t exactly a hub of square feet deliciousness. My space is pretty small compared to some. I live in a 530 square foot apartment with my husband, daughter, and my cute fur ball of a cat. And you know what? We love it and we make it work.

We make it work because we want to make it work. We genuinely enjoy each other’s company and really do like being together. We have just enough space and honestly anything bigger at this point, would probably be overwhelming. Are we always going to live in this apartment until our dying day? Probably not. But for however long we choose to live here, we will be happy 🙂

530 square feet means things can become cluttered rather quickly if we’re not careful. It means that there is not that much space to clean so I am not spending marathon Saturdays trying to keep it sparkly clean and then collapsing from exhaustion. One bathroom works for us and cleaning it is a breeze.

My husband and I are careful about what we bring in, to make sure that we don’t start to feel overwhelmed by stuff. I regularly go through my daughter’s toys and books and together her and I decide if she still plays with the item and whether or not we can donate it to someone who will get more use out of it.

530 square feet also means we are not paying for space that is not being truly utilized. We use every square inch of our apartment and we save money by choosing purposefully, to live in smaller accommodations. We could pay more money for more space but that just didn’t make sense to us. Living smaller does.

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9 thoughts on “530 Square Feet of Happiness”

Isn’t it hilarious that there is this tiny house movement, but if you’re a family living in an apartment there ins’t much difference, except that maybe some tiny homes get put on a lot of land and/or can be moved. OK, can’t do that with an apartment. Anyhoo, I find that the bigger the place, the more that it tends to get filled with more “stuff.” I know people with storage lockers as big as my apartment. I mean a guy rents my garage because he doesn’t have room for his stuff, and I make $250 per month. Bonus! 🙂 Glad you are happy there!

You are so right! Apartments are kind of like tiny houses, lol 🙂 Bigger places do tend to get filled with stuff so we are totally okay with the square footage we currently have. Yay for making money off your garage!

Love it! We cut our square footage in half when we moved from suburbia to the farm. But we’re still enjoying life here in this house, even more than we did in the cities. On so many levels, happiness is a choice, isn’t it?

This will probably seem like a totally random question but I am getting ready to downsize quite a bit into a small condo. We have a cat and my biggest dilemma is where the heck we’re going to put her litter box. It’s my son’s cat and his current bedroom has a HUGE walk-in closet and we have her litter box in the back corner of it. The smaller place we’re looking at has tiny closets that won’t work. Do you mind if I ask what you do?

I’m impressed, Mackenzie! I like your philosophy: “Are we always going to live in this apartment until our dying day? Probably not. But for however long we choose to live here, we will be happy.” I hate to admit it, but I fell into the trap of thinking, “Once we buy our big home, then we’ll be happy.” In fact, it ushered in a lot of troubles.